I recently came across this video of Jacob Moon covering Rush’s 1980s hit “Subdivisions,” and it has bewitched me.

I love that you can hear the lyrics in their learned sweetness, hard half-anger, and egghead poignancy. These lyrics and the original music video were manifesto, landscape, and script for me and many other adolescents, especially boys, in the 1980s.

Subdivisions
In the high school halls, in the shopping malls, conform or be cast out
Subdivisions
In the basement bars, in the backs of cars, be cool or be cast out
Any escape might help to soothe the unattractive truth
But the suburbs have no charms to soothe the restless dreams of youth

As I take in Jacob Moon’s version on repeated viewings, and imagine its place in my current life frame, I notice how little in those lyrics need to change in order to retain as much force for my life at 40 as they did for my life at 13, when this song first came out.

Coming up on ten years of university teaching, and I have written recently at Rock and Theology about the temptations in the professorial life to “die young.” Jacob Moon and I seem to be about the same age, and it is easy to fantasize he took this song to heart like the legions of middle class kids in the 1980s did. This taking-to-heart makes some of these lyrics my informal scripture, annotating scenes from adult life: “Some will sell their dreams for small desires / and lose the race to rats / get caught in ticking traps…”

There is an adolescent force in the “individual against the masses” motif so memorably presented in the Rush lyrics of this era. But let’s not let embarrassment or fear too quickly separate our adult selves from what was once important to us and now forms the substrate of adult life. Seeking such a cultural through-line sometimes goes against the current of polite professional company, but is a continual theme in everyday life for fans of popular music, many of whom, freed from the sanitation laws that structure what used to be called bourgeois society, talk about what parts of themselves survive from the earlier eras of their lives, tied in memory to songs, concerts, musical personae.

I have found the incitements to give up on the dare that life represents to be a nearly habitual spiritual struggle in adulthood. True, there is a wisdom purchased at the cost of surrendering dreams, and doing this wisely is often taken to be intrinsic to a happy adulthood. But Jacob Moon’s cover of “Subdivisions” reminds me that is not the whole story. Eberhard Bethge wrote with generous nuance about his friend, theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, that the “driving force in his life was the need for unchallenged self-realization.”

What “Subdivisions” characterizes – yes, of course, too easily, if one must say so – as the emotional, intellectual, spiritual smallness of the suburbs, this smallness, seen now from the vantage of adulthood and the approach of “mid-life,” now seems to stand for those continual smallnesses confronted within and without as one settles into work and relationships over time. How much “geometric order” and how many “insulated borders” will come to claim and to dull what REM called “life’s rich pageant”! And I find Jacob Moon’s playing on top of the building illuminating. The original “Subdivisions” video featured helicopter-height scans of suburban neighborhoods, as if giving the visual interpretation of the song: see these clean and placid streets as the bars of an iron cage. But the band stayed separate from that environment, not in and amongst the neighborhoods they were commenting upon. (Leave that to U2, I guess.)

But here is Jacob Moon in this remake setting himself not exactly in the neighborhood, but right up above it, letting it fan out all around him and making it his frame. I hear him saying “let’s sing this song in the place it describes, the place that made us.” That he is on the roof and not the street gives me the sense that he’s also marking a distance from it, trying for the synoptic view. It’s just a little pedestal in the middle of middle class North American normalcy, as if to say, look that we get to preside, not without love, over what presided over us. There is something of the marvel of getting to “own” this song now, again as a key to what we’ve become. And then there is: oh, look, he’s even doing the whole song himself, reducing a rock trio to a solo act with cool electronics, as if that too somehow speaks to the climate the tune gives for adulthood.

In circulation here is the fight for singularity, now more tragic in the remake because we sing it without having fully “gotten out,” but probably more true for all that, too. The teenager in the original video become Jacob Moon in the cover. Here in this circulation and the bevy of artefacts that confect its consideration, here for me is a sacred meeting, how we get round to learning the depths of care for what we can become.

Tom Beaudoin
New York City, United States

 

 

3 Comments »

1. 

   Good Lord, i loved this song the first time I heard it, and this cover is just transcendent.

   Comment by myles — February 10, 2010 @ 1:25 pm

2. 

   Beautiful rumination, Tom.

   I was intrigued by your comment that “he’s even doing the whole song himself, reducing a rock trio to a solo act with cool electronics, as if that too somehow speaks to the climate the tune gives for adulthood.”

   Could you expand on that?

   Comment by Chris — February 19, 2010 @ 6:22 pm

3. 

   I grew up in the same neighbourhood (albeit a couple decades later) as Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson did, and I always think of this song as speaking about that place in particular. It helps that the original video is all Toronto scenes, the rows of houses look like the communities on the northern border of Toronto-proper (Vaughan, maybe?). It’s odd to look at it now, since I’ve moved into the downtown. I would not like to live in a suburb again, but I also have a nostalgia for those places. Kind of a strange relationship.

   Comment by Dan — April 19, 2010 @ 8:39 am

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